Opinion: Sexual assault survivors shouldn’t have to be eloquent to get justice

The flurry of outrage surrounding the Stanford rape case produced one of this week’s most engaging reads: Rebecca Makkai’s article in the New Yorker about her own experience penning a statement to the court as a survivor of sexual assault. It led the list of opinion pieces that grabbed our attention.

Makkai notes, as so many have, the power and eloquence of the letter the survivor wrote in the Stanford case.* At the time she wrote her own “victim-impact statement,” Makkai was a 16-year-old who’d been sexually assaulted multiple times between the ages of 7 and 13; she’s now 38 and an acclaimed author. Makkai writes about being accused of plagiarism by the defense attorney in her case:

“He knew teen-agers, he said. He had a teen-age daughter, he had a teen-age nephew. And his teen-age acquaintances could not write that well.

“The implications broadened from there. If I had fudged this statement, what else might I have fabricated? Even though the guy had already pleaded guilty, even though this was a statement of emotional impact, not my actual testimony, the victim was not to be trusted.”

Though Makkai was excoriated in the courtroom for the strength of her prose, the survivor in the Stanford rape case is being nationally lauded for the same. One of the many reasons that the majority of survivors don’t go public with their stories is because of the inconsistent response to their testimonies; who ever knows how they’re about to be treated?

In the United States, a person is raped every two minutes. A tiny but incalculable fraction — we can’t confidently track what is untracked, making rape statistics notoriously hard to pin down — of those rapes are reported, and a smaller fraction of those go to trial. Even so, there are thousands upon thousands of men and women who have written such impact statements. So why was it this statement that animated the country’s attention? Why was this the one that has been read more than 13 million times (at last count)?

Because the writing was gorgeous, strong and persuasive. Because the Stanford survivor said the things that survivors and their friends and families have yearned to say or hear expressed. Take this section in which she directly addresses her attacker, for instance:

Here’s the thing; if your plan was to stop only when I became unresponsive, then you still do not understand. You didn’t even stop when I was unconscious anyway! Someone else stopped you. Two guys on bikes noticed I wasn’t moving in the dark and had to tackle you. How did you not notice while on top of me?

You said, you would have stopped and gotten help. You say that, but I want you to explain how you would’ve helped me, step by step, walk me through this. I want to know, if those evil Swedes had not found me, how the night would have played out. I am asking you; Would you have pulled my underwear back on over my boots? Untangled the necklace wrapped around my neck? Closed my legs, covered me? Pick the pine needles from my hair? Asked if the abrasions on my neck and bottom hurt? Would you then go find a friend and say, Will you help me get her somewhere warm and soft? I don’t sleep when I think about the way it could have gone if the two guys had never come. What would have happened to me? That’s what you’ll never have a good answer for, that’s what you can’t explain even after a year.

Both Makkai and the Stanford survivor write generously about their experiences. So, instead of dialoguing with their words, let me add a thought about how we might consider impact statements more generally.

The Stanford survivor’s letter was incredibly powerful, but it shouldn’t have had to be in order to get our attention. The hard facts should have been enough to do that work. When we are moved to action only by language that seizes us, we tip the scales of justice in favor of the articulate and place an undue burden on survivors — the burden not only to communicate their trauma, but to do so exhaustively, lucidly, compellingly. Those who are at a different point in their recovery or less gifted with language deserve the same response. I hope that in the future all survivors who are denied justice will receive the very volume of indignation that has led nearly a million people to protest the light sentence handed down on the Stanford survivor’s assailant.

We owe every survivor the support they deserve in their pursuit of justice. But that support should be grounded in moral outrage — in a sense that rape is an act that has no place on our planet. We should not be animated solely by those cases in which the survivor is able to and chooses to communicate their experience in such striking language.

So much was going on in the news this week. The Times’ editorial board weighed in on California’s right-to-die legislation, how criminal sentencing decisions should be made, the ‘deal with the devil’ Republican party leaders made in endorsing Donald Trump, why it’s time for Bernie Sanders to log off, and more. Our opinion contributors wrote about everything from the value of history education to gluten-free diets to taxing the rich.

That didn’t leave us with too much time to catch other views, but we loved Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the New York Times on Muhammad Ali’s poetic verse, Jamelle Bouie for Slate on how America should resist a fascist, Charles Lane for the Washington Post on the virtues of superdelegates, and Ryan Kearney for the New Republic on how overrated Radiohead lyrics are.

In times like these, humor helps keep the wheels turning. Thanks to Andy Borowitz for his brilliant New Yorker article “Sanders vows to keep fighting for nomination even if Hillary is elected President,” which I revisited more times than I’d like to admit. And I was positively charmed (forgive the pun) to see that hundreds of witches banded together to put a hex on the Stanford rapist. Let’s see what Hecate, the goddess of life and death, decides to do with him.

*A note on my use of language, because the impact of language is what Makkai wrote about, and what I elaborate on. I prefer to refer to the sorts of crime perpetrated on the young woman on the Stanford campus as rape — we don’t deserve the clinical distance or ambiguity the term “sexual assault’” affords. In 2014, the Department of Justice updated the criminal definition of rape to be “[p]enetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” But that’s the language of federal prosecutors, and under state law, the perpetrator at issue was convicted of sexual assault, not rape. Additionally, I deviate from the legal system’s usage of the word victim and instead use the term “survivor” where I have the latitude to do so, as the term is widely preferred and used by those who belong to such a category.